The Italian fashion designer and textile industrialist Nino Cerruti is dead. The discoverer of fashion designers like Giorgio Armani died at the age of 91 in a hospital in Vercelli in northern Italy, the ANSA news agency reported on Saturday evening. Cerruti had undergone hip surgery there. From the 1960s he had turned a tranquil weaving mill in northern Italy into a leading global design brand.
SN/APA/AFP/RALPH GATTI
Nino Cerruti at the height of his fame in 1985
Actually, Cerruti would have preferred to be a journalist, but because his father died shortly before his 20th birthday, the philosophy student had to take over the family business in Piedmont, northern Italy, in the early 1950s. A decade and a half later, he ventured into the fashion industry and opened his first men’s boutique and design center “Cerruti 1881” in Paris in 1967, in homage to the year his grandfather founded the small textile factory in the town of Biella. At that time there was a designer named Giorgio Armani, who would later make a world career as a fashion designer himself.
Within a few years, Cerruti was gaining a large international clientele with its ready-to-wear men’s ready-to-wear range. It was not until the mid-1970s that Cerruti also made women’s fashion and thus went the opposite way of the other Parisian couturiers, who all came from women’s fashion. Cerruti also made a name for itself with perfume creations for men and women, and sportswear was later added to the range. Cerruti dressed many Hollywood stars and was also the official designer of the Ferrari Formula 1 team. After the turn of the millennium, the company first came into American hands, then into Chinese hands.
Accessed on January 15, 2022 at 8:54 am at https://www.sn.at/panorama/international/italiener-modeschoepfer-nino-cerruti-dies-115538707